Jonathan Franzen's Big Book
By
Emily Eakin
Jonathan Franzen
Some days, Jonathan Franzen
wrote in the dark. He did so in a spartan studio on 125th Street in East
Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds
were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen, hunched over his keyboard in a
scavenged swivel chair held together with duct tape, wore earplugs, earmuffs
and a blindfold. ''You can always find the 'home' keys on your computer,'' he
says in an embarrassed whisper, explaining how he managed to type under such
constraints. ''They have little raised bumps.''
For Franzen, this is the
imagination's price, the arduous means by which he conjures a fictional world
and reproduces it on the page. ''It's very, very hard to concentrate,'' he
says. ''You have to hold your mind free of all the clichés.''
The days spent wrapped in a
blindfold were bad enough. Most, however, were even worse. There were days that
simply vanished, hundreds of hours lost to solitary hands of bridge, idle
fiddling with power tools, gratuitous afternoon naps. There were evenings that
disappeared as well, washed down with shots of vodka and followed by sleepless
nights. There were flashes of inspiration succeeded by months of despair. There
were false starts, wrong turns and page after page that had to be thrown away.
''Awful, awful,'' is how Franzen sums up a typical day from the last several
years of his life.
And now, at a restaurant in
Greenwich Village, he wants to show me something. Pushing aside his crab cakes
and taking up my pen, Franzen, a lanky 42-year-old with the shy, bespectacled
charms of a sandy-haired Clark Kent, scrawls a diagram on the swath of paper
tablecloth between us. A series of steep curves suspended between an X and Y
axis, the image looks vaguely familiar. It could be the plot of a trigonometric
function or an abnormal cardiac rhythm captured on an EKG. What it turns out to
be is a map of ''The Corrections,'' Franzen's new 568-page novel of family
dysfunction, the book that has caused him so much grief. Each curve represents
a character -- one of the five anxiety-ridden members of the Lambert family --
moving through time and space. As the novel weaves from one Lambert to another
and from a crisis in the present to a trauma in the past, the curves dip and
rise, begin and end. The novel, it turns out, isn't so much a story as a
symphony in five movements, each showcasing a different family member's
emotional highs and lows. Franzen's book, it is clear, has been painstakingly
planned out.
''I don't think you know
how weird I am,'' he says nervously.
True, until now, Franzen
has seemed dishearteningly normal. He is earnest and unassuming -- a little
skittish, perhaps, but hardly overwrought. Yet when it comes to his work, it is
clear that he is a man consumed.
''How many pages did you
throw away?'' I ask.
Franzen leans forward in
his chair and looks at me hard, testing my capacity for belief. Then he raises
his right hand in the air until it is three or four feet above the ground,
hovering in the vicinity of his chin.
''Hundreds?'' I say,
impressed.
''Thousands,'' he says in a
deep, pinched voice.
Wary of playing the role of
angst-ridden author, he retreats. ''In the end,'' he says, ''it came down to
making myself grind out five pages a day.''
That said, there was an
awful lot at stake.
In 1996, Franzen made a
reckless public vow. He did it in the pages of Harper's, in a bitter, eloquent,
intensely personal essay titled ''Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a
Reason to Write Novels.'' The big socially engaged novel was dead, he declared,
killed off by TV. Serious postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon, William
Gaddis and Don DeLillo were doomed to irrelevance. Contemporary readers wanted
entertainment, not news, engaging stories, not ideology. This knowledge filled
him with despair.
But he did more than just
diagnose the problem. He implied that he could solve it. He cited an old novel
he had chanced upon that gave him hope: ''Desperate Characters,'' by Paula Fox.
The book, a gripping account of a Brooklyn couple's disintegrating marriage,
seemed to offer a way out of the impasse. It was emotionally intimate, yet it
reverberated with insights about the larger world.
''At the heart of my
despair about the novel had been a conflict between my feeling that I should
Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream and my desire to write
about the things closest to me, to lose myself in the characters and locales I
loved,'' he wrote. Fox had done both. Franzen would too. Now that he could see
the ''possibility of connecting the personal and the social,'' he wrote, ''my
third book began to move again.''
Here was a tacit promise:
Franzen would deliver a book that had it all, a novel that was intimate,
socially engaged and compelling. How he would do so wasn't exactly clear.
Still, the essay was a daring bit of audacity on the part of an obscure young
writer with two novels to his name. With its provocative argument,
authoritative tone and chummy allusions to members of the American fiction
establishment (at one point, he excerpted a personal letter from DeLillo), it presented
Franzen as a literary major leaguer from whom one could expect great things.
''I remember wondering who
Franzen was,'' says James Wood, a book critic for The New Republic, ''and
feeling that he was obviously well connected as well as smart and ambitious.''
That said, he adds, the essay ''was bold, because the proffered ambition was so
apparently in excess of the available evidence -- that is, his actual novels,
few people having read them.''
Franzen concedes as much.
''I raised the bar,'' he says now. ''And boy, it was really high stress.''
After its grueling
seven-year gestation, ''The Corrections'' finally hits stores this week,
propelled by extraordinary hype and expectation. At Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, Franzen's editor, Jonathan Galassi, calls the book a masterpiece. So
does the trade journal Publishers Weekly. Foreign presses have forked over
hefty sums for translation rights. The Hollywood deal is done. (It went to the
producer Scott Rudin, who adapted ''Wonder Boys.'') So far, Franzen has pulled
in more than a million dollars. ''It's nice to be able to pick up the check
when I go out to dinner,'' he says with characteristic understatement.
And he just may have pulled
it off: his novel is as clever as those of the brainy postmodernists he admires
but infinitely more accessible. Like DeLillo and Gaddis, he dazzles the reader
with trenchant riffs on contemporary life -- everything from mood-enhancing
pharmaceuticals to bisexuality to cruise-ship culture. But rather than relay
his thoughts about the world through chilly rhetorical pyrotechnics or plots of
mind-boggling complication, Franzen embeds them in the lives of affecting human
characters.
It sounds suspiciously
simple. But this, it turns out, is Franzen's big idea: characters are what the
contemporary social novel lacks -- and what can save it from oblivion. And come
to think of it, he has a case. In stuffing their books with formal gimmicks,
postmodernists turned the social novel into an act of intellectual machismo and
long ago showed characters the door. (Can you remember the name of a single
person from ''Underworld,'' other than J. Edgar Hoover?) As male novelists
abandoned psychological realism for oracular pronouncements, the job of
creating memorable characters became women's work -- the forte of writers like
Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx.
Franzen aims to bring these
traditions together. Like DeLillo, he wants to take on the world, but rather
than populate his book with an anonymous horde, he gambles his ambition on a
single family: there is Enid Lambert, the obsessive Midwestern wife, fixated on
the impending family Christmas; there is Al, her exasperating husband, battling
Parkinson's-induced dementia. Then there are the three mixed-up Lambert
children scattered along the East Coast: Gary, an unhappy suburban banker;
Chip, a raffish failed screenwriter; and finally, Denise, a sexually confused
gourmet chef.
The Lamberts are a neurotic
group, but each deals differently with inner turmoil. Enid, for example, finds
euphoric escape in Aslan, a state-of-the-art ''personality optimizer''
prescribed by a manically cheerful doctor on a cruise ship. But her son Gary
goes it alone, determined to avoid drugs or therapy. ''He was afraid that if
the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to
his opinions,'' Franzen writes. ''He would forfeit his moral certainties; every
word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an
argument.''
If ''The Corrections''
delicately probes the ambiguous blessings of a society dedicated to pain-free
living and chemical quick-fixes, Franzen in person is more explicit.
''Alleviating suffering is very good, but it comes at the cost of what I would
call a narrative understanding of one's life,'' he says. ''You don't need to have
a story anymore. Your story becomes: the chemicals in my brain were bad; I
fixed those chemicals. From a humanitarian standpoint, that's great, but it
makes for a less interesting world.''
Though he tackles heady
themes, he is not above mining the pathos of a tearful family Christmas. He's
betting that there is a demand for stories with the intellectual heft of
DeLillo and the emotional satisfactions of Alice Munro. ''After DeLillo,'' he
says, ''the living North American writer I most admire is Munro.''
The sense of mission -- or
hubris -- that informed his Harper's manifesto has become, if anything, more
intense. ''I'm very concerned with providing a maximally enthralling
experience,'' Franzen says of his work. ''Another 20 years of boring literary
novels, and the thing's dead.''
It's one thing to decry the
social novel's poor reputation. It's quite another to try to do something about
it. In fact, it's hard to think of an undertaking more thankless or foolhardy.
In an age when the rewards of fame, money and readership often go to the author
with the prettiest face, most traumatic childhood or best connections, the
incentives for devoting years of effort to an ambitious work of sustained
imagination -- rather than, say, a single summer to an autopathography and
laser-eye surgery -- are few indeed. Nevertheless, while Oprah was promoting
inspirational fiction, and The New Yorker was adding seductive author photos to
its short-story debuts, Franzen was living what used to be known as the
writer's life.
It is an existence that was
once fairly common. Now it seems almost eccentric. Its hallmarks include not
only harrowing amounts of discipline and despair -- but drastic social
deprivation as well. For five years in the 1980's, Franzen and his wife,
Valerie Cornell, from whom he is now divorced, shared cramped quarters in
Somerville, Mass., in which, separated by only 20 feet, they wrote eight hours
each day and then, after a dinner break, read for five more. Franzen supported
them both with a weekend job as a research assistant tracking earthquakes for
Harvard's geology department. He and Valerie ate out precisely once a year: on
their wedding anniversary.
The novelist David Foster
Wallace, who met the couple around this time, remarked that they were living
with ''faces pressed against the inside of the bell jar.'' At the time, Franzen
says with a laugh, ''I didn't know what he meant.'' Valerie did. ''She said
that if a social worker had found us, we would have been turned in for
self-abuse.''
He tells this story late
one night while driving back to Manhattan from the Rockland County suburbs,
where he spent the day with a friend, the short-story writer David Means, and
his wife, Genève. (''The Corrections'' is dedicated to them.) Perhaps it is the
liberating darkness of the rental car, but Franzen -- who can be painfully
self-conscious and is prone to editorializing his speech with remarks like,
''Now that I'm 120 words into this sentence, I'm going to start over'' -- is
suddenly expansive. ''I've had a boring life for the most part, but such a
weird life at the same time,'' he confides. ''I feel that nobody has led such
an isolated life for so long.''
Writer friends leading
similarly isolated lives don't necessarily see it that way. ''It would be easy
to cast him as the ink-stained wretch who lives in an oubliette and comes out
blinking into the sunshine every once in a while,'' says Wallace, who, along
with a handful of other young novelists, has become one of Franzen's closest
friends. ''But Jon finds contact with humans nourishing.''
This could be a result of
having gone long periods without much of it. Franzen's writerly life began
shortly after he and Cornell graduated from Swarthmore in 1981. At a gathering
of the campus literary magazine, she dazzled him with a casually brilliant
interpretation of a particularly inscrutable poem. ''She's a really, really
good reader,'' he says. In 1982, they decided to marry and devote themselves to
writing.
A decade later, Franzen was
miserable. His marriage was unraveling, his father was dying of Alzheimer's
and, though he had published two accomplished novels, he was broke and
essentially unknown. His first book, ''The Twenty-Seventh City,'' appeared in
1988, when he was 29. An intricate thriller about urban planning set in St.
Louis (Franzen's hometown), it made a splash, but some critics were confused
about its intentions. Franzen is still miffed that The New York Times Book
Review reviewed it in the Crime/Mystery section. ''Strong Motion,'' published
in 1992, was equally inventive, featuring earthquakes, corporate conspiracy and
family conflict. It did worse than the first book, a fact Franzen chalks up to
''a not immediately likable main character, a bad jacket and second-novel
backlash.''
By the time ''The
Twenty-Seventh City'' appeared, he and Cornell had left Somerville and had
embarked on an itinerant existence, occupying rental apartments and borrowed
houses, together and alone, for a few weeks or months at a stretch, in New York
City, Spain, Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Boston and Italy. The
constant relocating, he says now, was part of a futile bid to save the
marriage: ''We kept trying to solve nongeographical problems geographically.''
It didn't help that Franzen's manuscripts had found publishers while his wife's
more experimental novel had not. ''When the rewards of our jointly held
ambition began to accrue to me,'' he says, ''it was very hard.''
When they separated in
1994, Franzen was supposed to be at work on his third book. He produced an
80-page lament about his feelings of cultural irrelevance instead. That essay,
titled ''My Obsolescence,'' was never published. But Franzen mined its dark
themes for his Harper's essay. In late 1996, he moved to his current address, a
modest third-floor walkup on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and sold ''The
Corrections'' to Farrar, Straus & Giroux on the basis of 200 pages. Yet
when his 1997 deadline arrived, he had thrown all but 20 of those pages away.
''I spent a full year
trying to reconceive what I had,'' he says. ''I produced a 100-page first
chapter. It was a failure. I was way past the delivery date. I'd spent the
advance. Finally, I gave up and decided to build a book that consisted of five
short sections. That's when I made the chart.''
Unlike other novelists wedded
to reportage -- say, Tom Wolfe -- Franzen did not haunt Bronx ghettos or
Atlanta social clubs in search of material. His struggles took place mostly in
the solitude of the studio he began renting in 1997, a nook inside a sculptor
friend's Harlem loft. When asked how he was able to write convincingly about
Parkinson's or the streets of Vilnius (to which Chip flees on a rash impulse),
he shrugs. ''I've never been to Lithuania,'' he says. ''And my agent's brother
is a neurologist; we went to dinner.''
Nor did he raid his circle
of acquaintances for titillating personality traits. If characters are
Franzen's great distinction as a writer, that's because he has dedicated the
bulk of his strenuous imaginings to making them up. For ''The Corrections,'' he
spent years developing characters before he tackled the plot. First came Chip
in 1994, followed by Denise, Enid, Al, then Gary.
As for his title, Franzen
originally conceived a central prison theme for ''The Corrections,'' but as the
decade crept on, and the stock market boomed and busted, it took on an uncanny
new resonance. ''I'd been predicting this for years,'' he harrumphs about the
recent downturn.
Franzen had an easier time
with his title than with his prose. ''I was in such a harmful pattern,'' he recalls.
''In a way, it would begin on a Friday, when I would realize what I'd been
working on all week was bad. I would polish it all day to bring up the gloss,
until by 4 in the afternoon I'd have to admit it was bad. Between 5 and 6, I'd
get drunk on vodka -- shot glasses. Then have dinner, much too late, consumed
with a sick sense of failure.''
Other days consisted of
variations on this self-destructive theme: work sessions prematurely ended or
avoided altogether, whole days consecrated to polishing old prose rather than
forging ahead with new. This was one procrastination strategy that paid off:
many of Franzen's paragraphs are tours de force of rhythm and tempo, building
to emotional climaxes and then artfully ebbing away. In general, though, it was
a waste. ''I hated myself the entire time,'' he says.
One night, he got scared.
He asked a female friend who had come from Philadelphia to see him to leave in
the middle of a downpour. Soon after, he made an appointment with a doctor who
could prescribe antidepressants. In the end, unsure about how a substance like
Prozac would affect a writer's brain, he decided not to go.
''I feel my sensitivity is
my business,'' he explains. It could be Gary Lambert talking.
''One of the things a
really good novel can do is give you a sense of recognition about the strange
private life you are leading,'' he tells me that night in the car. ''Our life
is not just our parents' dying or being angry about what we read in the paper.
It's about questions: should I take Prozac or not? What is my personality then?
What is my self then? In our technologically changed world, it seems to me that
a book not only has to do justice to those private stories, which are really
old-fashioned stories of loss or love or longing or anxiety, but also take into
account that those stories are now unfolding in a regime that seems to be
resisting the narrative account and replacing it with material accounts: you
can buy or drug your way out of unhappiness. For people who are struggling with
'What does my life mean?' and 'How should I live it?' the best novel you can
write is the one that's going to take into account both.''
It's hard to think of
suffering as research. No doubt Franzen wouldn't see his own this way. Misery
befell him; he didn't seek it out. And as his despair receded, his work began
to flow; he wrote most of his book in 2000. Besides, as cultural myths go, that
of the suffering artist has been hopelessly overplayed. Sylvia Plath's
depression, Jackson Pollock's drinking: was their art really fueled by their
afflictions?
Still, isn't it possible
that Franzen's suffering, far from being an obstacle, was in fact a condition
for his success -- not simply because great work demands enormous toil, but
because to make us believe in his characters' struggles, he needed to endure
his own? And hardship, it is clear, is something that Franzen is almost too
willing to bear. As he says, hunching over the steering wheel and peering into
the dark, ''Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.''
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